Is March Making Isaiah Mad?

Until one year ago, I had never heard of such a thing as "March Madness." We are not sports fans. Not at all. I've often joked that I married the one man on the planet even less interested in sports than I am. It's just not our deal. We don't really get the point of it. Why would we want to watch other people play games?

The single exception to this is when one of our children is playing. That changes everything. I love to watch my children do just about anything. Without question, I prefer the choir concerts, piano recitals, plays, and dance performances over sporting events, but if it's sports they're playing, I'm totally down. Shulamith played basketball, softball, and soccer as a child. Then she cheered for high school football, basketball, and wrestling. So yeah, I attended my share of sporting events (every game she cheered at for three years, actually), but my purpose there was to watch her cheer, not to watch the sports themselves. Then came Eli, who played football, baseball, and basketball through elementary and middle school, and even into high school if you count church basketball. I watched nearly all his games.

But watch college or professional sports? Not a chance. I don't even know those people. Why would I care about their games or whether they win or lose? Unless one of my kids is playing, I'm not interested. And until last year, Isaiah felt the same. He was not an athlete, himself, and to the best of my knowledge, he never once attended a single sporting event in his four years at Skyview High School. His interests lay with other activities: video-games, Business Professionals of America, and choir. In college, his one and only focus has been computer programming.

So you can imagine my surprise last spring when he told me he was in some sort of basketball pool. Apparently, each year in March, a bunch of college basketball teams compete in a tournament called "March Madness." And last year, Isaiah somehow got involved in betting on which team would win. I tried to dissuade him, reminding him that gambling is never a good idea, but he rationalized that $10 isn't enough money to be considered gambling. Hmmm. I was still living in Billings at the time, so I wasn't as closely aware of this whole deal as I am now. I only know that he managed to win the whole pot and come out of the Madness $100 richer.

Fast forward one year. It appears March Madness is once again in full swing. Every Friday I pick Isaiah up at his dorm and bring him home for the weekend. His weekend job is much closer to our house than Westminster, so he almost always stays with us from Friday to Sunday. Today, however, he texted me and asked me to pick him up at a coffee shop a few blocks from campus. Okay, fine. When I arrived, I learned that he and his friends were forced to go there to watch the game after the power suddenly went out on campus. The second we got home, he raced into Seth's room to turn on some game, knowing full well I wouldn't allow sports on my TV. Evidently, there was some sort of upset in this particular game because we heard Isaiah screaming at the TV set. This is my Isaiah we're talking about. At least he looks like Isaiah.

Dragging himself away from the TV to go to work, he mentioned that he doesn't know when he'll be able to write the English paper that's due Monday because he will have games to watch every waking, non-working moment of the weekend. Seriously? How could anybody watch that much basketball. It all looks exactly the same. One team gets the ball, and they all run down court, and the one team tries to shoot. Then the other team gets the ball, and they run the other way and do it on the other side. Over and over and over and over. Occasionally, just to keep people from dying of boredom, they all line up around the basket and let one guy shoot without bothering him. That's really all there is to this game.

Which brings us to these questions: Has Isaiah been abducted by aliens who've put someone else inside his body? Has he undergone a personality transplant? Did he hit his head too hard?

Or is March making Isaiah mad?